Foldvary: Vote for the Minor Party of Your Choice!

Editorial

Vote for the Minor Party of Your Choice!

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor

In California, where I live, many voters are unhappy with the major-party candidates for governor. They think the Democratic-party governor bumbled the electricity crisis and caters too much to special interests that contribute funds to his campaign, while the Republican-party candidate made an accusation about the governor’s receipt of contributions that turned out to be glaringly false, something he should have checked on prior to making this blunder. Fortunately in California, we have several minor parties as an alternative to the otherwise dismal choice.

All across America, there are minor “third” parties on the ballot. While the Democratic and Republican parties have some differences, they both support similar broad policies. For example, there is little substantial difference in foreign policy between the two major parties. Both happily go to war, whether to Vietnam or Iraq. In economic policy, the Republicans and Democrats both support the tax structure we have and programs such as spending more to subsidize prescription drugs and nationalize education. Even where there are heated differences such as on the right to abortion, in the end, the actual policy pursued does not differ much.

The innovative ideas and visions for the future come from the minor parties. They offer not just some changes within the system, but different and possibly better systems. The Libertarian Party seeks radical liberty, an exhilarating world with the freedom to do anything peaceful and honest, and no bureaucrats to tax everything that moves. The Green Party envisions a world with a clean and beautiful natural environment, to switch voting to proportional representation by party, and also have government provide for basic needs such as medicine and housing. The Reform Party seeks to stop the capture of government by special interests. The Natural Law party wants to harness our knowledge of nature and the power of meditation to heal society, and also to bring together the minor parties. The Constitution Party, known in California as the American Independent Party, seeks to base our laws on God, the traditional Family, and the Constitution.

All of these visions are incomplete, but at least they offer a real ideology and program for significant improvements. They offer a refreshing change from the negative campaigns and superficial appeals of the major parties: brochures showing the candidate with this smiling wife, several grinning children, and a dog with its tongue hanging out. We don’t see his back side, where he has a wallet bulging with cash from the moneyed interests he caters to.

When we vote, we vote on two levels. On one level, we are voting for particular candidates and propositions. On a higher level, we are voting for an entire political system. Voting for a Democrat or Republican is not just voting for that person to represent you, but also endorsing the status-quo, the current political system they represent. If you vote for a major party candidate, you become indirectly responsible for what he does; you put him in power and have approved of the political structure in which he operates.

Some folks are disgusted with politics, see it as corrupt, and so refuse to vote. But I think there is no such thing as not voting, if you are eligible to vote. If you don’t cast a ballot, you are in effect voting to let everyone else decide the outcome. There is no way to tell from the percentage who do not cast ballots whether they are just lazy, or have better things to do, or refuse to vote out of principle.

So if you don’t like the current system of politics, government, and law; if you think the system needs major changes or we need a different system; if you think the government does not really represent the will of the people; if you strongly disagree with the way we elect government officials; then you should logically vote for a minor party. There are enough minor parties in most states so that one will most closely fit your own vision. So vote for the minor party of your choice! In many cases, you can vote for several minor parties, since most minor parties do not have candidates in all the offices to vote for. If there is no minor party for a particular office, then just leave that blank. Voting blank sends a message that you do not approve of the choices offered. Voting blank is a clearer message than not voting at all. It is like “none of the above.”

Why vote at all? Because if you care about the world, voting is the righteous thing to do. Voting will make you feel good. Sure, one vote will not determine any outcome except in a small election. But that is not why most people vote. Many vote because they think it is a civic duty. We also vote because at the moment we cast the ballot, we are sovereign human beings. All other times, we are slaves to government chiefs. They tax us, restrict us, use force against us, cheat us, and bully us. The tyrants murder innocent people, and get away with it. There is little we can do about it; they have the big guns.

But when I am in the voting booth, I am king. During those few minutes, I am truly free. I get to say what the taxes and spending shall be. I get to choose who gets in power. At that moment, I am politically sovereign, I use my sovereignty to reject the system. It is a secret ballot, so nobody knows how I really voted, but I do, and the satisfaction is in my mind. If I did not cast a ballot, I would feel deprived of my sovereignty, and by voting to let others decide, would have implicitly endorsed the current system. No! I don’t endorse it! I must vote “no!” on the system. I do this by voting for minor parties and for blankity blank.

So on Tuesday, go to the polls and vote. That moment of sovereignty will be good for your soul, and if you vote blank or third party, you will be morally absolved of responsibility for the evil deeds that government may do.

Copyright 2002 by Fred E. Foldvary. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, which includes but is not limited to facsimile transmission, photocopying, recording, rekeying, or using any information storage or retrieval system, without giving full credit to Fred Foldvary and The Progress Report.What are your views? Share your opinion with The Progress Report!

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

not exactly Georgism, the Single Tax on land value proposed by Henry George. He did, tho’, inspire most of the real-world implementations of the land tax that some jurisdictions enjoy today, and modern thinkers to craft geonomics. While his name and our remedy both begin with “geo” since both words refer to “Earth”, the two have their differences. (a) George pegs land monopoly as the fundamental flaw while geonomics faults Rent retention. (b) To fix the flaw, George was content to use a tax, while geonomics jettisons them in favor of price-like fees. (c) George focused on the taking while geonomics headlines the sharing. George envisioned an enlightened state judiciously spending the collected Rent while geonomics would turn the lion’s share over to the citizens via a dividend. (d) And George, as was everyone in his era, was pro-growth while geonomics sees economies as alive, growing, maturing, and stabilizing. Despite these differences, George should be recognized as great an economist as Euclid was a geometrician.

an answer for Jonathan of the Green Party (Nov 7): “What does ‘share our surplus’ mean?”Our surplus is the values that society generates synergistically. It’s the money we spend on the nature we use: on land sites, natural resources, EM spectrum, ecosystem services (assimilating pollutants). It’s also the money we pay to holders of government-granted privileges like corporate charters. We could share it by paying for the nature we use and privileges we hold to the public treasury then getting back a fair share of the recovered revenue. Used to be, owners did owe rent (“own” and “owe” used to be one word). And presently, some lucky residents do get back periodic dividends: Alaska’s oil dividend and Aspen Colorado’s housing assistance. Doing that, instead of subsidizing bads while taxing goods, is the essence of geonomics.
Jonathan: “Is local currency what you mean?”
Editor: It’s not. Community currency is a good reform, but every good reform pushes up site values. That makes land an even more tempting object of speculation. Now, any good will eventually do bad by widening the income gap – until you share land values.

what you do when you see economies as part of the ecosystem, following feedback loops and storing up energy. Surplus energy – fat or profit – enables us to produce and reproduce. To recycle society’s surplus, the commonwealth, geonomics would replace taxes with land dues (charged to users of sites and resources, in-cluding the EM spectrum, and extra to polluters), and replace subsidies with rent dividends to citizens (a la Alaska’s oil dividend). Without taxes and subsidies to distort them, prices become precise, reflect accurately our costs and values; then, motivated by no more than the bottom line, both producers and consumers make sustainable choices. While no place uses geonomics in its entirety, some places use parts of it, most notably a shift of the property tax off buildings, onto locations. Shifting the property tax drives efficient use of land, in-fills cities, improves the housing stock, makes homes affordable, engenders jobs and investment opportunities, lowers crime, raises civic participation, etc – overall it makes cities more livable. Geonomics – a way to share the bounty of nature and society – is something we can work for locally, globally, and in between.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

about the money we spend on the nature we use. It flows torrentially yet invisibly, often submerged in the price of housing, food, fuel, and everything else. Flowing from the many to the few, natural rent distorts prices and rewards unjust and unsustainable choices. Redirected via dues and dividends to flow from each to all, “rent” payments would level the playing field and empower neighbors to shrink their workweek and expand their horizons. Modeled on nature’s feedback loops, earlier proposals to redirect rent found favor with Paine, Tolstoy, and Einstein. Wherever tried, to the degree tried, redirecting rent worked. One of today’s versions, the green tax shift, spreads out of Europe. Another, the Property Tax Shift, activists can win at the local level, building a world that works right for everyone.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

not a panacea, but like John Muir said, “pull on any one thing, and find it connected to everything else.” Recall last month’s earthquake in El Salvador. We felt it and its formidable after-shocks in Nicaragua. Immediately afterwards, my host nation, one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, sent aid to its Central American neighbor. The Nica newspapers carried photos of the devastation. They showed that the cliff sides that crumbled had had homes built on them while the cliffs left pristine withstood the shock. Could monopoly of good, safe, flat land be pushing people to build on risky, unstable cliffs? If so, that’s just one more good reason to break up land monopoly. What works to break up land monopoly, history shows, is for society to collect the annual rental value of the underlying sites and resources. That’d spur owners to use level land efficiently, so no one would be excluded, forced to resort to cliffs. To prevent another man-induced landslide is yet another reason to spread geonomics.

a study of Earth’s economic worth, of the money we spend on the nature we use, trillions of dollars each year. We spend most to be with our own kind; land value follows population density. Besides nearness to downtowns, we also pay for proximity to good schools, lovely views, soil fertility, etc. These advantages, sellers did not create. So we pay the wrong people for land. Instead, we should pay our neighbors. They generate land’s value and deserve compensation for keeping off ours, as they’d pay us for keeping off theirs. It’s mutual compensation: we’d replace taxes with land dues – a bit like Hong Kong does – and replace subsidies with “rent” dividends to area residents – a bit like Alaska does with oil revenue. Both taxes and subsidies – however fair or not – are costly and distort the prices of the goods taxed and the services subsidized. By replacing them and letting prices become precise, we reveal the real costs of output, the real values of consumers. Then, just by following the bottom line, people can choose to conserve and prosper automatically. A community could start by shifting its property tax off buildings, onto land – a bit like a score of towns in Pennsylvania do; every place that has done it has benefited.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat – or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off – a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.